


Searching

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Blood, Canonical Character Death, Dream Bubbles, M/M, Sadstuck I guess, There're large wounds and blood idk, Troll terminology, erikar - Freeform, he is dead so, i'm not good at tagging stuff, they're on the meteor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-30
Updated: 2013-09-30
Packaged: 2017-12-28 01:30:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/986048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You've been searching and searching, yielding no results, and it seems that when you finally do, there's far too much to say and so little time to say it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Searching

The most important thing to remember about leaving the past behind is to never look back, no matter how tempting it might be. You learned this from experience, and you will never forget. He made a lot of ridiculous decisions, but how much of that actually matters now? 

It’s been over a sweep, you think, and you haven’t dreamed of him in the entire span of time between his death and where you are now. He hasn't come to visit you in the dream bubbles once and you think you might kind of deserve that. Or, maybe, he’s just avoiding you. But he could be avoiding everybody, now that you think of it. Maybe he doesn't want to be found. Maybe he’s hiding from all of his “friends” who turned on him when he thought he was doing the best thing. Maybe he really believes that everything was meant to happen the way that it did and that he was meant to die before you all even got on the meteor. 

The meteor is boring. There’s nothing to do. You know you’re only halfway through your journey but it’s already infuriatingly lacking in activities to partake in. Sure, you now have Dave and Rose, plus those who survived and could come along on the meteor with you, but what fun is it after a sweep in the same place? It feels like you’re barely moving, like there’s no way you’re traveling at the speed of light toward the end of the yellow yard. The span seems too large for that. Rose always says that it takes three years to get there, and you've come to figure that a sweep is a little bit larger than one of their human years. She says you've been on the meteor for a little over two years. You've been keeping track. It’s a year exactly today.

Everybody has been getting a little antsy to get off the meteor, and a lot of them have been traveling through the dream bubbles meeting all of your dancestors and seeing your old friends and past selves. Sometimes it’s fun, but you need a break from that for a while. Every time you enter the bubble to talk to the dancestors you end up being lectured at by your own who is trying to get into your head about his own personal social views on everything, which you, frankly, couldn't care less about. You just want to talk to the others, to maybe get to know them, but you’re always caught there with him. And you need a break.

You’d been trying to find his bubble for the entire span of your seemingly never-ending trip into the limitless expansion of the yellow yard. Rose always tells you it’s neither never-ending nor limitless, but you've come to think otherwise. She always tells you that the longest part is behind you, that you’ll be there at the end of this human year. But really, it’s been too long already.

Aradia says you’ll be passing through another bubble soon, which could mean a new reunion or another waste of time. You don’t want to see any of the others, you've seen them all already in the bubbles. Nepeta, Equius, Feferi, you've already seen all of them in the bubbles. Why is he still hiding? Why won’t he let you find him? How did he figure out he was dead if he won’t talk to anybody? He has to know he’s dead. If he didn't, he would have been pestering all of you the second you stepped into his memory. So if he’s avoiding you he’s doing it on purpose. You want to know why. You want to talk to him. You want to see him. Anything.

You decide to walk up with everybody who’s already planning on entering the bubble, and everybody’s already waiting there. Hell, they all want to see their friends, whether they've seen them already in the bubbles or not. They don’t know that the only reason you still go through the bubbles is to find him. If he’s not here you’ll leave without a word. Or maybe you won’t. You suppose it depends. You’re all waiting and as you pass through the entry to the bubble, you see something you weren't expecting to see. You've already visited this bubble. You’re all standing in the lab, and you realize that you've been here when you see Feferi and Kanaya, the dead versions, and they are happy to see you again. Again. You've already been through this bubble and he’s not here. He wasn't here last time and you know he’s not going to be here this time, so you leave. You go right out of the bubble and back onto your meteor because you don’t want to deal with false hope right now. You want real hope. But the hope in your team has vanished without a trace. You can’t find it. The hope is lost.

As you walk back, you see there’s another bubble approaching, so you decide to go check it out. You’ll be by yourself, which is nice. At least then you can walk around in the bubble by yourself in a place you haven’t visited in a long time. You’d do anything to get off of the meteor for a little while, if only for a couple minutes. So you step forward into the new bubble by yourself, and step onto sand. You’re on a beach. You don’t know which beach it is, maybe it’s the one by Gamzee’s hive, though you don’t see any hives around. It’s just sand and water and shells around you, and you figure this is as good a time as any to walk around and collect yourself. After all, it looks like it’s around the middle of the night, the perfect temperature to walk around the shoreline and stare off into the shore. Even now, as the waves curl over the glistening minerals that make up the sand beneath your feet, you think of him. You know he was never one for swimming, but the water was still vivid reminder to you.

Your covered feet shallowly sink into the sand as you pad across the beach, looking out at the water and plunging your hands into your pants pockets. You imagine him, out over the water on his aquatic lusus, shooting down whales so that Feferi’s lusus doesn't end up killing you all. You can almost see him there, but you don’t. Because it’s just a memory. Except, you've yet to identify whose memory it is. You think it might be Feferi’s or Gamzee’s, judging by the beach-side scenery, but really any of you could have had a memory on the beach. You start thinking of all the times when you've been somewhere outside of your hive, and it’s hard to recount many times. You've been to places like to Gamzee’s hive, and maybe to somebody else’s, but you've never been FLARPing because of the potential risk to the discovery of your rare blood caste. Still, you can’t say you've never thought about it. Five of your friends had done it when they were younger, and Vriska was even one of the best FLARPers there ever were. You were kind of jealous, but you would never be able to go out and risk that, especially with the injuries that are almost guaranteed to come upon entry into the game. It’s not even really a game, more of a right of passage now that you think of it. You are trained to improve your skills, which is benefiting. 

You think the memory might belong to one of the five who had participated in the potentially fatal activity. You remember that Vriska was on the water a lot, she had a ship just like her ancestor. And, you also remember that he used to go out on the water a lot too. It made sense that way. You look out to rolling waves of the ocean past the beach where you were deposited upon entry. You see no ships at all in your line of sight, so you think that perhaps he’s not here. Again. Either way, you take the time to yourself to walk around. It’s been so long since you've been able to anyway. Your shoes feel strange against the shifting grains of fine minerals beneath them, and you think for a moment about taking your shoes off, but decide not to. 

You look down at the sand as you walk, but you’re not sure why; you just do. You watch the sand as you move closer to certain spots and away from others, and you notice a glittering discoloration staring up at you that makes you stop. The sand in front of you isn't the distinct off-white that you've been walking on for who knows how long now. It’s a dull...violet? No, that’s illogical. You’re definitely imagining it. Maybe you just miss him that much. You decide to keep walking, but you stumble across another patch of the violet-tinted sand, except this time the coloring is more prevalent, and you think that you can’t possibly be imagining this. You kneel down on a section of the coast that you aren't seeing any vague discoloration on, and bring a hand down to daintily touch the hued mineral in front of you, and it feels just like any of the other damp sand around around you. You make a little scoop with your hand and lift the sand with it, bringing it closer to your face so that you can see it more clearly. It’s almost the exact shade of your companion’s blood, minus the watered-down discoloration and the way it sits on the sand on your palm. You look up and you really hope this is just grub sauce because this is not how you wanted to see him. Has anybody even visited him in this memory yet? Does he know he’s dead? Probably not.

You get up and follow the faint hue of the sand as you walk along the shoreline, quicker now, wondering where he could possibly be, if he was here at all. For all you know, it could have just been grub sauce. But you have a feeling that it’s definitely not. You keep checking along the beach, and you don’t see him for such a long time that you think you’re hallucinating about the violet in the sand, but then you see it. There’s a purple shred of fabric on the sand that you know must have come from his cape, but then why is it only just a sliver? You think that the piece is only about the size of your palm, and it worries you. Why is only a small piece of his cape lying here on the sand? Where is he? Is he okay?

You don’t notice him right away. After you find the piece of his cape, you look around and see a jagged orange object stick up slightly above the wave, but when the water pulls back from the shore it covers it completely. You know you’re not a good swimmer, never have been, and never will be, but you are going to save your friend if it’s the last thing you do here because he needs to know you’re there. That you care about him. And you do. So you’re going to help him.

You run into the water, not caring that your clothes are getting soaked and that everybody on the meteor will probably ask about them later, and you get to him as the tide levels out and you can see his horn jut above the water. You reach down and you can feel his head, his shoulders, his arms, and you reach under him and pull him up. He’s heavier than usual because he’s being weighed down by a whole lot of water, but you don’t care. You need to get him out, and quickly, too. because the tide is coming back and you really don’t want to be caught in that right now. You pull him (slowly, but you manage) onto the beach and now you see where all of the violet blood was coming from. He’s got an awful gash on the right side of his body, which probably goes from his chest down to where his gills end, and it looks really bad. Granted, it’s been clogged slightly by the sand and salt in the water, so it’s not bleeding as profusely as it could be, but you can tell that at one point it was. You can see he’s unconscious, and you wonder what he did when this was a real event and you weren't here to save him because he very well may have died. But you know that he didn't. The whole thing is weird for you because why wouldn't he tell you he was injured like this, even after (or if) he cleaned himself up when he gained consciousness? Unless he was afraid that by telling you, he would ruin his reputation as a powerful seadweller. That’s probably what happened, you think. 

Right now you need to get him awake, because he’s not doing very good to your sanity by being unconscious in front of you. You wonder how this could have even happened, but then you remember that time the Feferi had messaged you about a sweep ago about how she was beginning to lose her trust in him because he never got that whale for her lusus, and how he hadn't even talked to her until a couple perigees after he had been expected to deliver the carcass to her. You now think that this must be the time that this memory takes place, since he obviously wouldn't have gotten back to his hive for a while and this is the only time you remember Feferi telling you that he had skipped hunting for her. He never skips. This must have been what had happened. He probably got caught off guard, and one of the lusi in the area jumped him and he fell off of his aquatic hoofbeast lusus and been carried up here. The blood on the sand would suggest that you’re correct, and the fact that he is the only one here confirms it.

You quickly take off your shirt, which you don’t exactly need since the sun isn't up, and forget about the faint red grub scars that line your sides, because you’re not exactly worried about your mutation right now so much as his injured chest. You think that you should probably get the sand out of his wound, but you also think that by doing so you could very well disturb what’s sealing the blood flow now, being the salt and sand from the ocean. Your shirt is already wet, so you decide to just dab the cloth over his gash, getting the excess sand out, and you’re reassured that he’s alive when his muscles involuntarily flinch under the touch of the fabric. You know he’s going to sting when he wakes up. You don’t even know if you’re going to be able to stay in the bubble for as long as it would take to get him back to his hive and clean him up proper, though. You feel really shitty about that, but what else are you supposed to do? If the bubble passes through you’ll be left back on the meteor. 

He’s unconscious. He’s bleeding and he’s unconscious. _He’s alive_ , he’s bleeding, and he’s unconscious. You can work with that. 

You've never had to actually deal with any of your friends’ wounds, so you’re not quite sure what to do, but you know that even ghost selves have to breathe, especially if they haven’t undergone the whole _oh wait I’m dead_ thing. You can’t exactly press on his chest to start up his breathing, since he’s got that huge gash on his chest that runs down to his hip, so you do the only other thing you can think of and hope he 1.) doesn't find you stupid for doing it and 2.) doesn't think you’re kissing him while he’s unconscious. 

You blow air through his lungs, putting your hands on his face to keep his head from moving, and when you pull away he remains the same as he was. Shit. It didn't work. You suppose the only other thing you can do is try again, so you do. You blow more air into his mouth and hope it works this time, and you know that it does because then he’s coughing and you need to pull away from him so you don’t get his saliva in your throat. You think that he was probably using his gills when he was buried in the water, but you can tell that some water probably went down to his lungs when he was thrown into the sea, or whatever the hell happened, so you’re glad you got both of his vascular systems to work now. You don’t know if he’s seen you yet, considering that he’s squeezing his eyes shut as he tries to sit up but immediately fall back to the sand with an odd sounding yelp. Yeah, you bet that probably hurts quite a bit. He puts a hand over his chest lightly, and you see him flinch as he picks blood up on his fingers and brings it up to his face to inspect it, and that’s when he sees you. You thought he’d be surprised and jump back or something, but he doesn't. He just stares at you with his still yellow eyes and mouths the words, “what are you doing here?” as he puts his hand back into the sand. You know that you wouldn't be here if it weren't for the bubble, and he knows you wouldn't be here unless you had known about his accident, which you wouldn't have considering he doesn't have any electronics on him and he _was just unconscious_. You don’t exactly know what to tell him, though, because you know that dead selves in dream bubbles need to remember themselves if they've died. 

“I was just here, and I saw you,” you say, which isn't a lie, but it’s not the whole truth. He’s looking around, breathing kind of heavy, and you can tell he’s pretty beat-up and pretty frightened because he very easily could die (because, ya know) and here you are, out of nowhere. 

“It stings. A whole fuckin' lot, Kar. You need to help me. I actually feel like this happened before. Except that it couldn't have.”

“Dude, I know it stings, you've got a ginormous fucking cut on your chest, do you expect it to feel good? Okay, that’s beside the point. Can you move? At all?”

He tries to push himself up again, but can’t quite manage, and falls back onto the shore, wincing as he does, because the shock from the fall probably shot waves of pain through him. You have no idea how he could have survived this before. 

“No, not really. I’m havin’, like, the worst case a Déjà vu right now, though, except I don’t remember you bein’ here...Is this…”

Yes, he realizes he’s dead, you can finally get out of this living horrorterror. His eyes gloss over white, and you see his change of clothes go from the ripped up, soggy outfit he has on to one of his regular ones, so this was probably a random alternate self that died on some screwed up timeline, which everybody has. You’re about to say something to him, something about how you missed him and you’ve been looking for him, but before you can even blink you’re transported back to the meteor, and you know you’ve missed your chance. The bubble has passed through.

Your name is Karkat Vantas and the only time you've seen Eridan Ampora since Kanaya Maryam sawed him in half was right now, and your time is up.

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes I really like writing erikar sadstuck during school.  
> I guess this is kind of for my matesprit, she's really the only one I right all of this stuff for.  
> So yeah. Hope you enjoyed!


End file.
